In the travel industry, customers wishing to purchase tickets for travel generally begin by placing a request for a particular travel itinerary, either personally using an on-line or telephone-based reservation system or through a travel agent or travel provider. The customer's travel request may include, for example, proposed dates, departure location, and arrival location. In response, the customer is typically presented with a proposed itinerary and quoted the current price for the proposed itinerary. At this point, the customer generally must make a decision whether to purchase the ticket immediately. Customers wishing to wait before committing to the purchase may opt to place the ticket on hold, which, if the option is available, allows the customer to reserve the specific itinerary for a short period, typically 24 hours, with no guarantees that the price be the same at time of purchase. In a volatile travel market, ticket prices for travel, particularly for airline travel, are adjusted frequently, often several times in a single day, adding great uncertainty to placing a travel itinerary on hold.
Customers may want to place travel reservations on hold for a variety of reasons. Customers may need to first verify travel plans and coordinate travel with another party. Some customers may wish to wait and see if a preferred itinerary becomes available. Customers for whom price is a concern may want to wait and see if the travel price decreases. Once a ticket is purchased, however, the customer must often pay fees to cancel or change the itinerary.
Conventional systems, however, typically allow customers to place an itinerary on hold for only a limited time period, such as 24 hours. Placing an itinerary on hold in the conventional fashion may provide the customer with an extra day of flexibility but, after this brief time has lapsed, the customer is once again faced with immediately purchasing the ticket or again placing the itinerary on hold. Using conventional travel reservation systems, such as SABRE, EDS', System One, Covia, World Span, and proprietary reservation systems run by airlines, customers are not provided with information regarding the likelihood that a preferred travel itinerary will remain available for booking in the future. Travel providers, travel agents and other booking agents would also like to be able to offer this information to customers that seek advice regarding this decision about whether to make an immediate purchase or to defer the decision to purchase.
Travel providers face a related problem. Travel providers seek to maximize revenue by selling all available seats in the travel resource, such as a plane, train, or bus. To facilitate maximum revenue, travel providers typically offer seats in the travel resource in various “booking classes,” which vary, for example, in price, availability, and restrictions. Airlines, for example, offer seats on an airplane within Passenger Name Record (“PNR”) booking classes, such as “Y,” “Q,” and “L,” to name a few. A ticket in “Y” class, for example, may be a full fare coach ticket with no restrictions as to when it can be booked or whether it can be changed. Tickets in “L” class, however, while offered at a significantly reduced fare price, may require a 14-day advance purchase. Similarly, tickets in “Q” class might support a fare rule that requires only a three-day advance purchase.
Since travel providers, such as airlines, seek to make use of all available seats, while maximizing sales of the higher revenue tickets, the providers tend to offer fewer seats in each of the descending classes. For instance, if there were three classes “Y,” “Q,” and “L” for a flight on an airplane having 100 seats, an airline might initially offer 100 seats in “Y” class, 50 seats in “Q” class, and 25 seats in “L” class. By doing so, the airline is not offering 175 seats, but rather indicating a preference for the higher revenue classes, so that as tickets are purchased, and the travel resource begins to fill up, the remaining seats will always be in the higher classes. As each ticket is sold, the number of available seats in each class is reduced by one to ensure that lower revenue tickets are not sold at the expense of the higher revenue tickets. Continuing with the above example, it would be possible for all of the 100 “Y” class tickets to be sold, but there will be a maximum of 50 and 25 sold in the “Q” and “L” classes, respectively. Once the lower revenue classes are sold, those persons needing to travel will have to purchase the higher-revenue tickets. Similarly, on those flights that are not full, the opportunity to purchase lower priced tickets will ideally maximize ticket sales because of the discounted prices.
Electronic reservation systems, such as SABRE, allow travel providers, travel agents, and other booking services to all book and reserve seats essentially simultaneously. While seats are being booked and reserved by multiple services essentially simultaneously, it becomes a challenge to maintain accurate records of the number of remaining seats in each class. A particular airline will presumably have accurate records of seat availability for its own flights, but depending on how a central reservation service obtains its seat availability information, the central reservation service's information may not be perfectly synchronized with actual seat availability.
In the airline industry, central reservation systems employ at least two different models for updating the inventory of available seats. Using an Availability Status model (“AVS”), a central reservation system periodically accesses the host computers of travel providers, checks inventory for all travel resources, and stores the information locally. When the central reservation system receives a request to check availability for a certain travel resource, the system simply returns a result based on the local information that has been stored since the most recent check. Since a reservation system typically incurs charges each time it accesses a database, using AVS is cost efficient because, in the AVS system, remote databases with associated access charges are accessed only periodically. Using AVS may be unreliable, however, because a certain travel resource may sell out between system updates, thereby causing overbooking, or a seat may become available unbeknownst to the reservation system, thereby resulting in a lost sale.
By contrast, central reservation systems using the method of Direct Connect Availability (“DCA”) do not suffer from this potential unreliability, however they are significantly more expensive. These systems do not store information locally, but rather connect directly to an airline's seat availability database with every customer request. Therefore, central reservation systems using DCA are potentially more accurate than systems using AVS because the seat availability information is always current. Using DCA, however, is more expensive than AVS because the DCA system accesses databases more frequently than AVS and therefore generates more access fees than AVS.
Thus, the ideal balance between cost and benefit would be to use AVS except when it would be sufficiently likely to create a lost a sale or an over booking. The problem is that there is currently no available technology to determine when it is safe to use AVS and when it is sufficiently important to use DCA.